Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Jonathan, Michele, Laura, Ian (chair).
Apologies: Gill, Harry, Jenny, John, Kaz, Lesley, Pip.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
Matters Arising
Ian welcomed a candidate new member Laura to the group. Members took turns to introduce themselves.
Members’ Readings
Michele — read a further instalment of her novel in-progress: The Undesirables, set in Southern Africa during the Boer War, 1898-1902.
Mogau, formerly a housemaid at Anna’s homestead and now employed in the kitchen of the Officers’ Mess at Camp Irene, gets a visit from Boi, an inmate of the black camp, looking for work in the kitchen. Mogau lets him stay. Boi asks if he can bring along his brother Kogisi too, so Mogau now has two more helpers in the kitchen.
In the starving camps, Christmas 1901 is celebrated with nothing more than a religious service.
Jonathan — read a humorous piece entitled The Curse of Tesco. It contrasted the convenience of shopping daily for a household in the days of individual local shops with the awkwardness of the weekly shop in an out-of-town hypermarket.
Ian — has joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in order to subscribe to their house magazine Science.org. Not realising he’d joined a lively club campaigning for a greater say for scientists in (US) government, and one whose members like to get to know each other, he was surprised to be urged to submit a letter of introduction, declaring what he considered the most pressing scientific question or problem that needed to be addressed today. Ian opted for Public Education about Science itself.
He read aloud his letter, distributing copies to the meeting. He preferred not to hear whether members agreed with his views or not, but to have it criticised as a piece of creative writing.
Laura — revealed that she kept three diaries:
• a journal of her occupation as an opinion pollster
• a Mind-Body-Spirit journal of personal development
• an everyday journal of ordinary life.
She wondered if there was material here fit for publication, and how to go about it.
Members agreed emphatically there was. Ian observed that the English Novel started life as a collection of fictional diary entries of the novel’s main characters, offering Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an example. Other members pointed to Samuel Pepys’s diary, also James Herriot’s Vet memoirs. Adele had kept a Covid diary, started at the beginning of the emergency, instalments of which she has been reading aloud to the group.
Adele — read a further instalment from her Covid Diary, commencing on 2 February 2022. The huge rise in reported covid-related deaths came as a surprise. Did the figures contain some backdated deaths?
The number of ministers resigning from Boris Johnson’s government over Partygate continued to rise.
By way of relief from unremitting covid news, Russia had amassed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. US president Joe Biden was confronting the Russian head of state Vladimir Putin daily, the latter denying that his intentions were anything but peaceful.
Feb 6 saw the start of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. Adele felt that the Queen, herself above reproach, had been let down by her family, who were all presently mired in scandal.
Feb 12 saw Whitby full of visitors in bizarre outfits, here for the Steampunk Festival.
Feb 15: Hospitalisations were down, as were all covid figures nationally.
The meeting closed at 1:05 PM.
Whitby Writers Group 